However, TIC-80 only exists because PICO-8 does, and without money, presumably PICO-8 couldn't've been made, the dude would have had to be doing other work to live.

Previously this guy made Voxatron, which I imagine paid for PICO-8, and that presumably paid for Picotron, so if I don't buy Picotron, then perhaps I'll prevent his next work of art from coming to fruition?

Yes it bothers me a little bit that PICO-8 itself isn't open source, but I can't see the alternative, otherwise how can the dev afford to be spending time thinking about and working on these new things?

It's not as though this is a huge company, or that there are alternative means of generating income from it (no Enterprise wants PICO-8 support, for example).

I don't see an alternative to giving the dev a few bucks to keep making art projects that I love.

The pico-8 is very reasonably priced and for a few extra bucks you get Voxatron. I'm a huge advocate of open source but the pico-8 is just so lovely, and the community so creative and accommodating, that I didn't mind contributing. I have yet to check out the TIC-80 but I plan to after getting a little more fluent on the pico.

But TIC-80 just is so much better than PICO-8. Not just the resolutions (which people can argue are an aesthetic choice for PICO-8) but the fact that you aren't limited to lua but have a variety of languages (some Lisp inspired) in TIC-80.

Having such specific limits is exactly the point of PICO-8 though. If I wanted a variety of options, I’d be using a more traditional engine or library.

Do you have any examples? I’m pretty curious about Picotron, but would love to try an OSS alternative.

There are plenty of alternatives you could find on [1] in the context of fantasy console, almost all of them, oss or proprietary, active or dormant. And honestly many of them were inspired by PICO-8.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the contributors of the list of [2].

[1]: https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy

[2]: https://github.com/pico-8/awesome-PICO-8

TIC-80

https://tic80.com/

Picotron looks to be a different product from pico-8.